What to Do If You Need to Rebrand a Fully Set Intranet a Month Before Launch?
Rebranding hits hard when you pay extra attention to design and postpone launch for two months, perfecting and coordinating it with a lot of people.
Imagine this: your intranet project is almost ready. After months of design work, countless meetings, and long rounds of approvals, the launch is finally in sight. And then—it happens. The company announced a rebranding just a month before go-live. New logo, new design elements, new rules. Suddenly, all the work you’ve done feels outdated before it even reaches employees.
Sounds like a nightmare? Well, yeah, but it doesn’t have to be.
A Story from Experience
When we started one of our intranet projects, the team jumped straight into design. The client specifically requested that we incorporate the brand elements into custom web parts and pages. The approval process took longer than expected, with two extra months of back-and-forth with stakeholders. Both our teams wanted it to be a thing of beauty. Finally, everything seemed ready. And then, just weeks before launch, the company revealed its new brand identity.
Many parts of the structure had to be reworked. It wasn’t just about swapping a logo; pages, navigation, and many elements were tied to the old brand.
This experience turned into a valuable lesson, which we want to share with you.
Lessons Learned
Make the logo a parameter
Don’t embed it into designs—treat it as a configurable asset you can replace in seconds. It also makes sense to make its size and position configurable. The new logo may require new spacing settings compared to the previous one.
Build a configurable design system
Colors, fonts, and layouts should be modular. When branding changes, the system adapts instead of requiring a redesign. Such a solution is perfect for intranets where you have a lot of separately branded pages. So, if you have sub-brands, complex projects, or products you want to promote internally, you should consider building a configurable design system to brand each page as needed. Of course, you will tap yourself on the back when you don’t have to rebuild the whole design system to follow the company rebranding process.
Flexible global navigation
Menus must be adjustable, not hardcoded. Different business units and markets need control over what employees see. Some intranet platforms, such as Microsoft SharePoint or LumApps, allow you to have multiple sites within one intranet portal. Each site may have different branding and navigation structure. However, depending on your overall system, you may need to keep universal global navigation for all the sites with the portal. In this case, we strongly recommend having some level of flexibility for additional navigation items per site or setting up group restrictions to display some elements for specific users.
Language-specific navigation
In multilingual companies, each language version should have its own menu setup. Such a company may have location-oriented projects, initiatives, and services. Of course, you’ll want to make such initiatives accessible via global navigation. To avoid unnecessary translation work and users’ confusion, you may want to separate menu settings for each language you have on your platform. It saves endless headaches later.
Make every brand-related element configurable
The devil is in the details, and sometimes such a detail can win you a lot of fans or give you a massive headache. If you incorporate a brand-related element into your intranet, you may want to make it configurable. For example, if you want to add a specific color as a background or a part of the logo to a widget, it will look great in the whole design system as long as it stays the same. If anything changes, you’ll need to make code additions to any widget that contains such decor. That is why it is better to add such elements as variables that can be configured in the widget settings.
Best Practices Moving Forward
Rebranding is more common than we like to think. To protect your intranet project, you can make it more adaptable to design changes. The less style dependence on hardcoded elements, the more reliable the design system. Separate branding from core functionality and content. That way, you won’t have to rewrite your code. Create reusable, modular components instead of one-off designs. Don’t hesitate to spend a few extra hours adding design functionality in each major element’s settings for admins.
Rebranding an intranet at the last minute isn’t fun—but it can be manageable if the system is flexible. The key takeaway? Future-proof your intranet against change.
Because if your intranet can survive a rebrand a month before launch, it can survive just about anything.
